When I was growing up, my family didn’t have a television. This made me a trifle eccentric among my peers, but I nonetheless picked up, by cultural osmosis and glimpses at other people’s houses, the essentials of TV culture: how to operate a remote control, the Jeopardy! theme song, and the social progression of Sesame Street from “the best” to “a thing for babies” to the nostalgia-fuelled best again. I grew up in a post-television generation, irrespective of my own participation in it.
But none of this is unique to the internet. As the linguist and internet researcher Susan Herring points out, her generation of baby boomer teens hung out “aimlessly” in malls, at drive-in movies, at sock hops and school sports games and public parks.
The Full Internet People solved this problem by using social tools that their parents weren’t on, jumping ship for a new one every couple years to remake their networks afresh, and leaving their cringiest moments buried on defunct platforms. Friendster gave way to MySpace gave way to Facebook. Social networking sites tried to solve this and prevent themselves from being abandoned by letting people set privacy settings and pick a specific list of people to share each post with.
McSweeney reasoned that “lol” must be conveying a message about the phrase as a whole, a meaning that’s compatible with flirting, softening, and empathy but not with love, directness, and checking in. The difference between flirting and saying “I love you” is plausible deniability. Likewise, using “lol” can soften what might otherwise be interpreted as a confrontation , but would undermine a serious direct statement .
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